Rural Route Film Festival

Just when you thought New York was all film festivaled out, a new one comes along and proves you wrong. The two-year-old Rural Route Film Festival, a mix of features, short films and music videos that runs this weekend at Galapagos Art Space, is a marvelous oxymoron: a celebration of rural life anchored in North America's biggest city.

According to the festival's mission statement, Rural Route seeks films related to farming, the country and rural people, but leaves it up to individual filmmakers to explain how their movie satisfies those criteria. In other words, if a film fits, you know it when you see it.

To wit: Montieth McCollum's Hybrid, a funny, intense documentary about Milford Beeghly, a 100-year-old man obsessed with hybrid seed corn. The director just happens to be Beeghly's grandson, and judging from the documentary, a streak of poetic obsessiveness runs through the family bloodline. Not content to just point the camera and ask questions, McCollum adopts a more subjective, Errol Morris-like approach, mixing interview footage with odd cutaways, including old commercials and time-lapse footage. It's almost as if he's trying to depict not just his grandfather, but his grandfather's imagination.

Folk music fans won't want to miss Mimi Pickering's Hazel Dickens: It's Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song, a biography of Hazel Dickens, arguably America's last great authentic folksinger. The film depicts Dickens as an icon of America's ever-struggling unions (especially the rural ones) and points out how her empathy for working people transcends not just geography, but the type of work being done. Her music is appreciated by factory workers and coal miners alike, and was used on the soundtracks of the pro-labor films Harlan County USA and Matewan. And yes, there are Hazel Dickens songs—16, in fact.

Refusing to confine itself to life in the United States, Rural Route is also showing Louder than Bombs, a 2001 drama from Poland about small-town teenagers. The story revolves around Marcin (Rafal Mackowiak), a 21-year-old mechanic who loves his girlfriend and can't see himself leaving the small town where he grew up. When his dad dies and relatives converge, he reevaluates his life. Directed by first-time feature-filmmaker Przemyslaw Wojcieszek, it's an excellent movie—at once sexy, profane, innocent and charming, in the spirit of films like Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show.

Rural Route will also showcase music videos (including work by Azure Ray and Bright Eyes) and numerous short films.

Galapagos, 70 N. 6th St. (betw. Wythe & Kent Aves.), Williamsburg, 718-782-5188, call for times, $5.

MATT ZOLLER SEITZ